[hkmurakami]

>Quero Education is an ed-tech startup out of Brazil that is promising to help solve under-enrollment issues at Brazilian universities. Contrary to what most of us would think, coming from schools challenged daily by a lack of professors and dormitories, enrollment at Brazilian schools would need to double to just match the number of available seats.

This is perplexing to me at first glance so hopefully someone from the country can shed some light on this issue. In the states, if anything, we've oversold the college education (and advanced degrees like law degrees) to the point where a great number of students are unable to attain the careers (implicitly) promised by these degrees. They are often crushed by a mountain of debt and struggle to pay it back over a lifetime. Prospective students have finally caught onto this (hooray Internet!), and many lower tier law schools are shutting down.

Brazil, according to this blurb, does not have this problem. In fact it has the opposite problem of not enough students? If this were the States I'd be quick to dismiss it as "the schools don't provide value to students, thus they are underenrolled, and they should shut down." But this is probably not the case -- are prospective students genuinely missing a great opportunity to educate themselves and set themselves up to greatly improve their lifetime earning potential? Would love to get a local perspective here.

[iurisilvio]

Techcrunch did a nice interview with them, asking some of your same questions.

These private colleges have a lot of government support through financial aid to poor/black/minorities attend a college. These colleges are profitable even with empty seats. Filling these empty seats for half of the price is awesome, but they won't crash without it. The company behind most of these colleges merged with another one this year and their stocks (KROT3 and ESTC3) are growing fast (50%+ this year).

https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/19/quero-education-an-online-...

[marcioaguiar]

The number of higher education institutions more than doubled in Brazil in the last decade.

I'm not an expert, but I think this was largely because of a government program called FIES, which finances private colleges and universities for students and the student will only pay the government a year after receiving the diploma. Payment is divided into very low portions. It is an excellent deal for the student and the educational institution. This program was greatly expanded in recent years and almost every student was able to receive funding.

With the crisis, the program suffered a major cut. I believe this will further increase the spaces not occupied.

[pmtarantino]

Sometimes you don't attend college because a) you are not ready (your high school preparation wasn't good, so you will likely fail), b) the costs are really high so you can't afford it. You start working on the side while you are in college, and after some months of struggling, you finally chose the job instead the education.

I am from Argentina, and this happens too.